There's a toll road option for a portion of my commute, and since it's the google maps default, the current/average commute time almost never changes!

If we have the time range rather than having the exact time, that would help as it would be easy to set and kind of flexible to have.

i want to bookmark my work => home route for a set duration and be able to open that link every day

Once I input the value I come back to the page every 5 minutes or so to check - A Refresh button would certainly help. Unless you are auto-refreshing.

P.S: even in case of auto-refresh, a button can act as a placebo for users like me. Just my 2c ;)

short summary of how we will be notified

The app should know when I want to get to work (8:00 a.m.) and then alert me in the morning when to leave as it had checked the traffic before me. So I could be getting ready for work and it would send either a push notification or sms saying to leave now to arrive on time as it sees heavy traffic on my commute.It can check Google maps or any GPS service to see how bad traffic is and can alert you at a set time , like 6:00 a.m. since that's when I'm awake and getting ready. 

"You need to leave within the next half hour in order to arrive by 8:00 a.m. today."

"You must leave by 7:15 today in order to arrive to work by 8:00."

i found this app here by trying to find an app that alerts me when to leave because I'm trying to find something that does this for my boyfriend. We live in Orlando and the main highway here is extremely unpredictable with traffic and we can't always leave at the same time each day. However, we'd need to check traffic early and we can never remember to check the traffic when we wake up (so we know to leave earlier than normal or to do our normal routine)